Judge to White House: Save Those E-Mails!

Ruling on lawsuits brought by two private groups, a federal judge has ordered the White House to retain e-mail copies while the court system sorts out whether the Bush administration has violated federal law requiring the preservation of e-mail records.

The suits contend that some 5 million White House e-mails are missing, reports the Associated Press.

Today’s order by U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy “should stop any future destruction of e-mails, but the White House stopped archiving its e-mail in 2003 and we don’t know if some backup tapes for those e-mails were already taped over before we went to court. It’s a mystery,” says Meredith Fuchs. She is a lawyer for the National Security Archive, one of the plaintiffs.

The Bush administration had argued against keeping e-mail copies, contending that backup tapes were a sufficient record.